Across the Sands
by Sihaya
Summary: (short chapter uploaded) Irulan's story after CoD. Angst, remorse, romance, Fremen- the whole bit.
1. Hajra

Across the Sands

~Hajra

~*~

_The desert weeps for the profound grief of the prevented voices_.

-Inama Nushif 

~*~

               Irulan stood on her balcony, her hands resting gently on the white stone. She looked out across the sands of Dune, across the desert she had come to love so dearly. Although she felt that Arrakis might be the only place that she could slightly feel like she belonged, even the raging winds of the coriolis storms could not fill the giant void that her entire life's events had left in her heart. 

               The biggest void belonged to Paul Muad'dib. He had ripped a searing gap into her heart that would never heal. It ached night and day, and although the falling of the suns and moons slightly lessened the pain, Irulan felt that no matter how many sleepless nights she passed she could never be better. She could never be whole.

               But then, when had she ever been whole?

~*~

               Pages of parchment behind the princess rippled in the breeze. The sounds reminded her of her work, the only life she had. A couple volumes of her work were already finished- **Muad'dib, Family Commentaries** and **The Humanity of Muad'dib **lay printed and bound in pieces of thick cloth, tied with heavy string. Irulan felt that the words of the books were still too sacred, too personal to be shared yet with Arrakis, with the world. It was too soon after the Preacher departed from this world, too soon after Alia died. It was still too soon after the world, as Irulan and the rest of the Empire knew it, crumbled around their feet and dissolved into tiny pieces. 

               Soft footsteps followed the sound of an opening door as Irulan remained with her back turned to the door. _Let it be death, _she thought calmly. _Let it come now. _

               "Irulan?"

               It was not yet her time to go. "Ghanima," Irulan said, a small smile crossing her face as her daughter- of sorts- came and stood beside her. Ghani rested her hands next to Irulan's on the railing of the balcony as she too stared out across the desert. 

               "I'm worried about you, Irulan," said Ghani, meeting Irulan's eyes. Her compassionate eyes held a prism of emotions, emotions no one would ever know. "You're so quiet lately," she continued. "It's like you've already left this life and departed into the next, and yet your body is still here. Are you sure you're all right?" 

               "I'm fine," said Irulan.

               "No," Ghani said softly, leaving no room for argument. "You're not all right. I see right through you, Irulan," she said, forcing Irulan to meet here eyes. She leaned slightly closer. "You know I know you too well for you to lie to me." Irulan bit the inside of her lip and turned away. Ghanima sighed and turned back to her desert. "The desert is leaving," she said, the undercurrent of feeling so strong in her voice that it almost made Irulan weep for Dune and the disappearing desert. "I can see it almost as much as I can feel it. It has been going on."

               "Liet brought many miracles to Arrakis," said Irulan. 

               "My mother said such things," said Ghanima sharply. "Maybe you could say that the Golden Path was Dune's miracle- but I'm not so sure."

               "Your brother"-

               "My brother is in the desert," said Ghani bitterly. "He runs…" her voice trailed off, and her eyes closed halfway. "The Golden Path is a miracle for tomorrow's Dune," she said after a few minutes of silence. "But for my brother, it is the path to Shai-Hulud, and a certain death. He is the only one that can save us, but he will die in the process." 

            The two women fell silent, stunned slightly by this outpouring. Irulan could smell a storm on the wind blowing off the desert. The breeze carried the sand pellets off the dunes towards the two on the balcony. 

               "You loved my father, didn't you?" said Ghanima. 

               Irulan took a shuddered breath. "More than anything in this world," she said. Ghani sighed.

               "I'm sure, Irulan," she said seriously, leaning forward slightly, "I'm sure that you will have one last stab at happiness before you die. You will have your _hajra,_" said Ghani, "and you will find what you are looking for." 

Irulan held Ghani's gaze. The blue-on-blue of her eyes was startling, imprinting its image onto her retina and staying with her long after the last scent of Ghanima's perfume was carried away on the desert wind. 

"I've already began my _hajra_," said Irulan, all the remorse and resentment and love that she had felt for her entire life poured into that statement. Ghani nodded, and then left the balcony, leaving Irulan alone with her feelings- and with the desert.

Disclaimer- pretty much everything belongs to Frank Herbert. 

A/N- set after CoD. 


	2. El Sayal

Across the Sands

~El Sayal 

~*~

All I ask you is for another chance 

_Another way around you_

_To live by circumstance once again_

_-Crestfallen_

_Smashing Pumpkins_

~*~

               Leto returned to the palace at dusk and shut himself into his chamber. Ghani stood outside the heavy crested double doors that led into the emperor rooms, wringing her hands in anguish. 

               "Maybe he needs a moment, Ghanima," Irulan suggested, gently laying a hand on Ghani's shoulder. The girl tensed slightly under her foster mother's touch, although, Irulan noted, not as much as she did when she was younger. Sighing, she removed her hand. Ghani turned around to meet Irulan's gaze with her sorrow-filled Eyes of Ibad. 

"He's changing, Irulan," Ghani said, her voice weighed down with the sadness she had felt since she was born, which had increased terribly since her father's death and her brother's Path had been found. "My old Leto is disappearing with the desert, and with the sandworms that roam its depths."

"The Golden Path"- 

"The Golden Path is a curse upon my brother and my family," snapped Ghanima. Her voice lowered, as her eyes flashed in anger at what had happened to her life. "But he had to take it- it was his fate." Ghani sighed. "Destiny called- and Leto had to answer." She looked at Irulan from under her lashes, her head tilted down. "Leto isn't the type to turn away from destiny," she whispered.

The two women stood in silence before the towering doors for a few moments. Then one of the doors opened a crack. "Ghani," a voice called softly from inside the cavernous chambers. Ghani nodded farewell to Irulan before disappearing into the darkness behind the doors. Leto's crest was carved high into the wood, a forever present reminder of his presence, and of the Path that he represented. Irulan stood before the crest, staring up at it for a moment. Then she turned abruptly away from the terrible symbol and walked quickly out onto the quiet promenade that led a little ways around the side of the great building. 

There Irulan stood, cloaked in the heavy scent of mélange. Blue tints had begun to show around the irises of her eyes, through the appearance-altering Tleilaxu contacts that she had been wearing to hide the signs of spice addiction. Something inside made her hide her Fremen eyes. Something was still clinging to the long dead Corrino princess that she had once been. 

She pressed her fingertip into a small pile of sand that had collected on the railing of the promenade. Once the sands of Arrakis had been entirely alien to her, but she felt more at home here amidst the dunes then she ever had in the stuffy palace back on Salusa Secundus. The winds rose slightly, pushing the grains of sand around her finger and into the desert's infinity.

A memory slowly filtered itself into her mind- "The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing." Gasping, Irulan hurried to her chambers and scrawled the verse onto a blank paper that was bound to a cover, which bore the words **_The Wisdom of Muad'dib. _**Irulan smiled, slightly more satisfied with herself than she had been a moment ago. She happily tapped a polished fingernail against the thick parchment paper, watching the ink glisten in the disappearing sunlight. 

Disappearing sunlight? Irulan glanced out the window. Her suspicions had been confirmed- a coriolis was sweeping its destructive wave across the desert and towards Arrakeen. She reached out a hand and drew the glass windows together, clasping them shut with a silver hook. She drew the curtains partway across the window, but left a section of the window open. Irulan enjoyed watching the coriolis storms, and the falling _el sayal_ that made tapping noises like hail against the expensive glass plates of the windows. A noise like a great thunder grew as the storm approached, flattening the dunes and throwing sand thousands of meters into the air. 

The tsunami-like wave of sand that sped across the desert leaped over the city's limits and sped in a deafening wall towards the castle. Irulan daringly threw aside the curtains the remainder of the way, and spread her arms out slightly. _Let them take me_, she thought, a smile crossing her face. The sand swallowed the palace, and the room was thrown into darkness.

~*~

"Stilgar?"

"Yes, Irulan?" 

"Where are the Fremen?"  The unlikely pair stood on the streets of Arrakeen, wearing the standard Fremen robes. Stilgar toed a sand-filled puddle as he stared out across the empty, saturated streets. 

"I've never seen an _el sayal _bring so much moisture from the skies," said Stilgar. "In my time, the children would be outside with oiled baskets in order to catch the rain of sand and the water that it would bring to our people."

"Times have changed so drastically, Stil," said Irulan as she surveyed the streets from under the hood of her _abba. _"Even in _my_ time, there were no puddles on the streets of Arrakeen. Now look," she said, sweeping her hand to indicate the watery landscape that surrounded them. "Puddles, mud! And not a Fremen in sight! Thus, the miracles of Liet."

"Miracles," Stilgar scoffed. "Miracles to kill the desert, and to wipe out our people. The Fremen ways are disappearing, Irulan," he said. "They are going with the old ways to join Shai-Hulud."

"Shai-Hulud and the desert will return to Arrakis, Stil, that's the Golden Path," said Irulan. "It's just that neither you nor I will be around to see Arrakis come back to its own." 

"We won't get to see the return of Shai-Hulud," said Stilgar, "only the death of him."

~*~

El sayal- "rain of sand" during a coriolis storm that brings moisture from the sky down to the ground

Abba- the traditional robe of Fremen women 


	3. First Moon

Across The Sands

~First Moon

~*~ A mirage comes up, it never ends –'City of Angels" The Distillers 

~*~

               The thick, creamy yellow pieces of paper that made up the half-finished volumes that Irulan was working on ruffled in the draft as Irulan returned to her room. The room was neat and well kept, with beautiful, simple pictures adorning the walls and layers of thin sheets and thick sheets designed against the erratic temperatures of the desert piled on the bed. Sheer curtains let in the light of the newly risen first moon. On a whim Irulan decided to leave the electric lights off, and spend the night with only a single candle. She selected one from the bedside table and struck a match. The flame flared in the darkness, and then calmed to a deadly yellow as it rested on the wick of the candle. Irulan blew out the match and settled it into a glass pan, leaving a whiff of fragrant smoke in the air.

               Words of ink scrawled on the thick papers had soaked into the parchment like water into a dry sponge. Irulan moved the thinner practice sheets aside from the thicker, bound volume as she sat at her desk and drew a pen out of a holder. She tapped the dry nub against the paper before dipping it in the inkwell, thinking for a moment, and then resting the pen back in the well. _I knew Muad'dib so well,_ she thought, _and yet I can't remember anything that he ever said to me…_

               That wasn't entirely true, of course, but all the words that she could recall at the moment were words of feeling, not words of wisdom or philosophy. Words not fit for the world to see, words that had Irulan kept locked in her heart away from exposure to the tainted world. They were words of hints, clues, opposites, and total hope. Words that were nothing, but everything to Irulan at the same time.

               Defeated, she shifted the heavy book aside and slid her inkwell across the smooth brown surface of her desk as she rummaged through her stack of notepaper, looking for a phrase that she had forgotten to record. When she found nothing, she drew her diary out of the secret shelf in the bottom drawer and looked through its contents. _Here, _she thought. _Here's something I can write down._

               _God created Arrakis to train the faithful, _she wrote. Wax dripped down the outside of the candle as she wrote, and the flame flickered and went out. Taking it as a sign to go to sleep, Irulan took off her clothes and slid into her nightgown. She pushed the heavier blankets to the bottom of the bed as to allow for the unusually warm desert night. The first moon waned as another rose, but the light still remained sufficient enough to shine through her eyelids. She watched the patterns dance on the insides of her eyes as she subconsciously went through her Bene Gesserit muscle exercises. _I can move one toe without disturbing the other, I can tick a muscle on the back of my pinkie finger at will, and yet my heart, the most important muscle, is weak. I cannot control my heart at will. How ironic. _

_               How dreadfully ironic._

~*~


End file.
